The story of gas and lead

A recent cover story in the muckraking Mother Jones magazine indicated that lead emissions from gasoline exhaust may have largely caused America’s great crime epidemic, which started in the 1960s and peaked in the early 1990s.

A recent cover story in the muckraking Mother Jones magazine indicated that lead emissions from gasoline exhaust may have largely caused America’s great crime epidemic, which started in the 1960s and peaked in the early 1990s.

Lead is a neurotoxin whose deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years. Lead poisoning causes blindness, brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions and cancer, often leading, of course, to death. And now, leaded gas fumes appear to have influenced crime rates.

If the ancient Egyptians were aware of lead’s toxicity, then so too, was an engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr., working on the problem of engine-knock for General Motors in Dayton, Ohio, in 1921. Midgley discovered that tetraethyl lead, also called TEL, reduced engine knock or “ping.” Earlier, he learned that ethyl alcohol, also called grain alcohol or ethanol, worked too.

There were two “problems” with using ethanol. First, anyone could make it in their backyard: it wasn’t a patentable process, so profits from it were minimal. Second, the big oil and gas companies didn’t want to share their market with farmers who grew corn for ethanol. Unlike TEL, which required just four grams per gallon, ethanol would fill 10 per cent or more of the tank, as it does today, and that would detract from big oil’s profits. (And, of course, conserve oil and gas resources).

To produce and market the new TEL additive, General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (known nowadays as Exxon-Mobil) formed a new company, the Ethyl Gas Corporation, in 1924.

Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati was Ethyl’s chief medical consultant. His laboratory was founded with an initial grant of $130,000 from Ethyl Corp. The lead industry paid Kehoe’s salary for decades, and he worked to promote TEL and defend it against its detractors.

Kehoe’s central position, which is thoroughly discredited today, was that lead appeared “naturally in the human body,” and the high blood lead levels in his subjects were “normal and healthy.”

In recent years, Robert Kehoe is identified as the father of a paradigm governing American industry and its hazardous products for much of the twentieth century. David Roberts of Grist magazine recently summed up the process: we use something without knowing whether it’s safe, and then discover it’s not safe. “Industry obscures the science and viciously battles off regulation for as long as possible, forecasting economic doom.”

Little has changed, and won’t until some variation of the Precautionary Principle is adopted: the proponent, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. Tobacco, the chemical industry, fluoride, mercury, pharmaceuticals, asbestos, all have applied similar strategies to that employed by Ethyl.

By 1963, Ethyl’s annual report bragged that its additive was used in more than 98 per cent of all gasoline sold in the U.S., and increasingly around the world.

In January 1970, GM announced it would meet pending clean air laws with catalytic converters, beginning in 1974. These converters were damaged by leaded gasoline. The phasing-out of lead in the U.S. which began in 1975 was largely completed by 1986, and entirely by 1989. So, the process still took 14 years!

As lead was phased out in the U.S., Ethyl first reacted by raising its prices, making more money on fewer sales. The company’s second reaction was to begin massive marketing abroad, especially in third-world countries, where the environmental standards lagged.

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